RSS Via IM!
December 7th, 2005 | Published in IM | 8 Comments
A new service is available that helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. The URL is http://immedi.at. Get it? Immedi.at? Immediate? Cool domain name, huh? (".at" is Austria’s country code extension). Great idea, I must say. The immedi.at website itself is a little boring. I expected something a little more web 2.0-ish, but that’s okay. I don’t need all that fancy AJAX stuff….
Anyway, back to the service itself. It’s really easy to use - all you have to do is add a "monitor this" button to your Firefox Bookmark Toolbar folder and click it when you are on a page that offers a feed you want to keep track of. (I’m sure there are instructions for IE, but…uh…who cares?). You click the button, pick an IM service and fill in your username. That’s it. Of course you can pause and disable the IMs as well. Oh, it works over Trillian, too. Just sign in to MSN or Windows Messenger first so you can add immedi.at to your contact list.
I’ll be testing this with a technorati vanity watchlist xml feed. Feel free to post about "Sarah In Tampa". *winks*
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December 7th, 2005 at 6:13 am (#)
I use Trillian Pro, and have been using it as my news reader since 1.0. Sadly they didn’tkeep their NEws plugin up to date, but in the past few months someone has developed a new news plugin. I like it better because when you’ve got 40+ feeds you’re watching, getting IM’d every 5 minutes can be pretty annoying….I’ve also got an IRC bot monitoring so I can just scroll through there too.
December 7th, 2005 at 8:38 am (#)
Real creative domain name i must say!
December 8th, 2005 at 1:09 pm (#)
Thanks for the post and the comments.
Yeah, we released in an early beta not really expecting many people to use immedi.at at the start but its totally blown up. One thing you’ll see in the next couple of weeks is some professional ass-kicking on the design side of the interface and the brand itself.
Cheers,
December 8th, 2005 at 11:00 pm (#)
I think Trillian’s newsfeed plugin is just as good, though less instantanious. I might try this out though…
December 9th, 2005 at 3:43 am (#)
This will be great for the digg front page stories feed.
December 10th, 2005 at 12:57 pm (#)
Hey - I sumbited this to Digg a while back. My bet is Sarah found this from my blog, but didn’t link, so I don’t get the following hype
December 11th, 2005 at 11:03 am (#)
Oopsie - I did see this on Joe’s site first — my bad! I had forgotten. Here’s the link: http://joeanderson.co.uk/blog/2005/11/receive_blog_updates_into_your.php
December 11th, 2005 at 11:29 am (#)
Thanks Sarah
. I know my posts aren’t as good as any podcast 
. Feel free to send a ping.